The ghosts of Les Baxter, Rowland S. Howard and Nina Simone are also in attendance. But whoever is pulling the strings remains hidden…possibly in plain view.

Structurally Wreck His Days recalls the grand collective statements of This Mortal Coil or Massive Attack, but musically its dreamlike overtures have more in common with Deux Filles, Global Communication, Arthur Russell, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Anthony Moore, even Robert Wyatt circa Old Rottenhat/Nothing Can Stop Us.

It roams far and wide: from the lambent, near-Balearic piano loops of the title track, to the Audrey Horne-worthy death-jazz of ‘Ghost From The Coast’, and hulking, bass-heavy soundsystem weapon ‘Reverberasia’. Side Two opens with the swelling, uplifting astral psychedelia of ‘…And I Tried So Hard’, while ‘I Beat As I Sleep As I Dream’ reprises the bleak existential synth drift of T.T.W.F.U.’s extraordinary 2014 10”, How Great A Fame Has Departed?.

A deep-seated socialist impulse drives the whole thing: with a dedication to women who have fought oppression throughout history, references to the Spanish Civil War and the UK Miners’ Strike, and an overarching belief in the international ideal (in fact the closing ‘Rosa / Kollontai’ explicitly invokes the Internationale).

Written and recorded over the course of 2014-15, Wreck His Days is a plea, or perhaps a requiem, for a world that embraces difference and upholds equality. Its contemporary relevance hardly needs emphasising.

Tracklisting:1. Wreck His Days 2. Ghost From The Coast 3. Reverberasia 4. ...And I Tried So Hard 5. I Beat As I Sleep As I Dream 6. Ay Carmela 7. Rosa / Kollantai

His work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers.

Informed by years of intensive listening to various types of free music, exploratory drug use and especially the “irregular organic forms” of the Belgian countryside where he resides, van Luijk’s process begins always with pure improvisation: music played in an intuitive, sensual way, without the employment of conscious technique.

He performs and overdubs each instrumental component himself, and out of this process micro-structures and loose arrangements emerge: the piece becomes an improvised composition. Over time he has evolved his own richly poetic musical language, full of allusions to drone, acid folk, classical, Musique concrète and jazz, but beholden to none.

Aura Legato is one of van Luijk’s darker and more acutely psychedelic offerings: a work of profound interiority, but one that also conjures images of old Europe and fin-de-siècle decadence – dabblings in Thelema, the fog of the opium-den – and has earned comparisons to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound, Mirror and HNAS.

This is Amateur Childbirth’s Christian Rock album. The previous LP from Ivan Matthew David’s solo project, 2015’s Pripyat, concerned itself with the blighted belief systems of UFO worshippers, Your Afterlife Is Cancelled expands this compelling solo project’s field of enquiry to look at a wider array of “religious anomalies” – cults, for want of a better word.

Each song is about a different such anomaly.To call Hicks’ vision apocalyptic would be to underplay its cruelty. The Bible’s rampant sadism pales in comparison. This is a world where faith – in a god or gods, in astrology, morality, or any meaning whatsoever – is merely a prelude to punishment. His lyrics are vivid glossaries of pain, abjection and indignity; the songs’ protagonists swim in blood, piss, shit and ejaculate.

Eschatology and scatology are indivisible here. Drugs are rampantly abused, albeit to little benefit. There are scalpel-flashes of humour in David’s wordplay, rhyming and dour Brisbane diction – but this offers scant consolation for the songs’ embattled subjects, who wait, in vein, for salvation, while crows peck out their eyes, blood pours from their ears, and psoriasis ravages their skin.

These words, for all their pessimism and body-horror, are cradled in minimalist, folk-rock arrangements that are quite dazzling in their beauty and grievously earned simplicity: Hicks’ monochord strum embellished with subtle violin, synthesizer and percussion shading.

It picks up where the nerve-damaged exotica of 2015’s A Shimmering Replica left off…acerbic “surf” guitar and synthetic salt-breeze fit for the Tropic of Yorkshire. Instant immersion in a potent, pungent psychedelia that feels equal parts cosmic and aquatic.

What Todd wrenches out of his instrument these days is a language unto itself (perhaps it always was)… a helical, ecstatic, grieving howl…a (super)natural efflorescence, beyond earthly description or transcription…ur-rock and post-everything. But equal emphasis is given here to pulsating machine rhythms and lush keyboard textures, with killer contributions from longtime fellow traveller Mel O’Dubhshlaine.

There were pre-echoes of all this in the recent(ish) Fluctuants and Aero Infinite: but To Make A Fool feels like the culmination, or the fullest expression, of something which was only glimpsed in those earlier works.

The side-long ‘Spray Two’ – gently eddying string-pads gradually slashed to all f***k with fraught piano improvisations – is a masterpiece in its own right. At its delirious peak, the whole thing boils over into brooding, arpeggiated noir-techno – Michael Mann’s steadicam roaming Leeds’ B-roads, some kind of tangerine nightmare – before finally cooling into a bleary starfield of pure and sumptuous hypno-tone.

This LP is a trip, in the most skull-splitting, soul-crinkling sense of the word, but it soothes and heals as well. A circular and transformative journey to the other side of the underneath and a landmark recording from one of the most adept and visionary nodes in Britain’s freakout underground.

Faith Coloccia and Alex Barnett return to Blackest Ever Black with their second duo album, Weld; working with synthesizers, affected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation and drum machines to create a music at once lucid and mystic. Its songs embody various experiential philosophies and objectives: searching for the sacred in the forgotten and supposedly useless; exploring the meaning of “natural”; listening for the pulse of the ancient; using technology both to materialise memory and to dream a folklore for a future age.

Coloccia and Barnett’s ambition is apparent early on in the stately, medievalist keyboard/choral poetics of ‘Truth Teller’, moving through the agitated wormhole techno of ‘Dreamsnake’, to the white light-emitting, near-symphonic plainchant of ‘Healer’. ‘Blight’’s zero-hour synth pulsations are first interrupted, then engulfed, by an extra-terrestrial broadcast of piercing bell and glass-tones; ‘AM Horizon’ is pitched bewitchingly between Prophet-5 pulp futurism and earthbound, atavistic dread; ‘Agate Cross’’s baroque harmonic sequence disintegrates at its very climax, cooling and dissipating into a deep starfield of pure tone.

Weld speaks its own distinctive dream-language, but we would certainly recommend it to anyone enamoured of the brittle sci-fi synth-scapes in Caroline K’s Now Wait For Last Year, the amorphous electronics of Beatriz Ferreyra’s recent work, Conrad Schnitzler’s more gothic moments, and even the gravest metaphysical reckonings of a Stockhausen or a Rozmann.